Sunday, March 11, 2012

A Morning In Phage-World

IT IS A bumper day for received wisdom at the Sunday Phage. Name a luvvie nostrum and somewhere in today’s edition you are sure to find it.

Violence against women, who are by definition forever blameless? Reporterette Nicole Brady has that covered with the latest instalments of a magnum opus based on interviews with social workers running group therapy sessions for men who are for the most part ordered to attend by the courts, or so one gathers. Now women can be very annoying, let us be clear about that, but there is never an excuse for thumping them -- even if, in the middle of a crowded restaurant, they throw crockery, cutlery, salt shakers and then storm out, pausing only to abuse another, entirely innocent diner at an adjoining table. But that sort of behaviour is of no account, according to Brady, a point she expands by quoting one the encounter groups’ chastened participants.

“The comeback from the facilitators always is: 'We're not interested in what your partner did or said, we're interested in how you could have managed that situation in a more responsible manner'.''

Ducking has always been the Professor’s responsible response, but that now seems entirely inadequate, given one of the other strategems which Brady gives readers to understand is part and parcel of the XY set’s arsenal of oppression. “Some [women] are held captive by threats that if she reveals her torment he will post footage online of them engaging in sex acts,” she explains. That is a new one, to be sure, at least at the Billabong, but it would certainly make YouTube an even more interesting corner of the web.

Having explained violence against women-- whose definition, by the way, has been expanded to include harsh words, disagreements about domestic finances, brooding silences and kicked walls – the Sunday Age re-directs its crusading heart toward the cause of another much put-upon minority, members of the Criminal-Australian community. According to state politics expert Farrah Tomazin, muggers, thump artists and other miscreants are being victimised by the Baillieu government’s intention to lock them up in greater numbers. The policy was announced a year ago, yet Tomazin notes the incidence of several varieties of crime has continued to increase. She makes no mention of the Labor hacks, bleeding hearts and social engineers elevated in plague numbers to the bench by the Bracks/Brumby government, nor of those appointments’ apparent reluctance to impose sentences which might keep miscreants off the streets for longer.

None of that, not in the enlightened Age, where the obvious is never nuanced enough to be apparent. But let Tomazin expound on the correct approach, which appears sourced to no better authority than her caring, forgiving, empathetic heart. If you happen to be kicked by a thug, punched by a Collingwood supporter or merely intimidated by the boisterous antics of young drunks misbehaving on public transport, please try to remember Tomazin’s words of wisdom: You are not the victim, they are:

Instead of spending millions to expand the prison system or deliver populist policies that might not work, the government should redirect more money into measures that might actually prevent crime, such as a better education system, more public housing, and improved services for drugs, alcohol and gaming. After all, if the latest statistics are anything to go by, promising to crack down on crime is easy. Reducing crime rates by tackling the underlying causes is another thing altogether.

One should not wish ill on others, even Fairfax luvvies, but it is amusing to picture Tomazin returning home one evening to find a thief tossing her cash and valuables into a pillow case. “Go right ahead,” one can almost hear her saying as she dials 000, not to report the intruder but to file a complaint about the Housing Commission’s criminal neglect.

The socialism of Russia and China have been abandoned for a realism and pragmatism matched no where else in the World right now. The naivety of the Age is spectacular.

eg. with 10+ years of ad nauseum apocalyptic fear mongering over "carbon pollution" how many times did they publish comparative graphs of the electromagnetic spectral absorption of major components to the earth's atmospheric gases. i.e. actual compare Nitrogen to Oxygen to Carbon Dioxide to Water Vapour in "clear air" to Water in Clouds at different altitudes. Correct me if I'm wrong about this Prof - did those graphs once appear in a newspaper dedicated to "carbon pollution"?

ie. We are talking about idiots yet again - aren't we? Of course it doesn't help and idiot to call them an idiot. Yet I suspect they read your blog.

Prof, I presume you know this but in multi million dollars state of the art submarines the air is routinely allowed to contain up to 20 times current sea level values of Earth Atmospheric C02 content - with no physiological deficits at all.If you walked into a room right now with 10 times current CO2 levels you wouldn't notice anything but clean clear fresh air.

Ask any Consultant gas man Anaesthetist in any Major Teaching University Hospital in this country. Ring them today.

The only difference you would notice is thriving plant life that needed to be watered less often.

The obsession with some people about a "clean" environment is a psychological thing about personal cleanliness.

You lady McBeth and Pilate were trying to improve their soap. And Gaytopians seem to be haunted with a sense of image.

The Age no longer fights for the truth. It fights for a series of causes and no skewering of the facts is too great to achieve those ends. People aren’t stupid; they see it. They know its journalism can’t be trusted and must be second-guessed at all times. For a newspaper, that is disastrous.

Maybe Tomazin has been 'thumped' once too often by her 'brothers' which has addled her thinking? Prison does work when the judiciary does its job and locks up those who are found guilty for the maximum sentence they can be locked up for. Handing down Section 10 Bonds and Suspended Sentences to the active criminal instead of the Big House, does not work, especially when it is quite obvious to the cops who have got them to court in the first place, their victims that they have wronged, and to the public at large that they should be locked away. The criminal needs to be separated from the society he/she has wronged and given time to think to get his/her thoughts together so that he/she may contemplate why he/she is being punished!

And as for Nicole Brady, maybe she should get out a bit more and spend some time with the local general duties cops who could show her some real domestic violence episodes that are not all generated by the male and the female is the victim!

Domestic violence isn't funny, and thankfully I have a husband who has never lifted a hand in anger since his army days, but you're dead right about the wrath of women.

We still prefer not to discuss the time I threw a fully-loaded terracotta pot at his head (missed, hit the wall), or the time I chased him out of the house with pizza in hand (missed, hit the garage door), or the bowl of ice-cream (got him).

The fact that men usually don't hit back in those situations does them credit, but women can be awful bullies if we're allowed to get away with it.

So Prof, what used to be called 'sulking around the house for a while' is now called 'violence'? But sulking is genderless. The Ape can only last about six hours of it from me before he reaches out sobbing for affirmations of love (and a nice cooked dinner). His own talent for sulking though is somewhat deficient and he probably needs lessons. He always thinks of something he wanted to share with me and has to end his sulk prematurely.

It's a mystery, isn't it, how we have managed so far without a social worker?

I expect that they are all too busy shoring up the morale of the criminal element. We shall have to struggle on alone.

I'm particularly taken with the Prof's description: Squadrons of social workers sliding own the fireman's poles at Dysfunction Central to provide "client" counselling and "appropriate levels of care-response".They've turned into a divisive and alienating industry what used to be entirely managed within a cohesive and caring society. What is now being reaped is what was sown - distrust of men, marriage (unless you're gay and subscribe to the new rainbow marriage paradigm where it's all so wonderful that the past thirty years of downplaying marriage no longer has any discordance or cognitive dissonance for them), families as the foundation of a healthy society, and christianity as its guide.

Ahh yes. Those "underlying causes", again. Every decade we get another starry-eyed generation of not-long-out-of-school reporters who discover "underlying causes". Let's not tell people to obey the law. Let's not punish people if they don't. Oh no. Let's eliminate poverty. Let's eradicate homelessness. Let's provide everyone with a job. Let's cure all alcoholics and drug addicts. Let's prevent all single girls from having fatherless babies. Let's provide all these girls with all the money they need. Let's make everyone happy so they won't want to commit crime. Should be a walk in the park. It just needs a caring and compassionate Labor government. Might take them two terms though.

Gosh you people in Melbourne are so lucky to have "The Age". You have direct access to all the latest groupthink, and so much juvenile drivel from those hackettes. Thank you Bunyip for letting us outsiders sample some of the latest stuff. Is it really published 7 days per week?

What a terrible Waste of Taxpayers Money University education is ! Apart from Medicine , research Science and Engineering the other courses are Total Bullsh irtt.Teaching people to be Selfimdulgent socialist Wankers is a Sheer Waste of Money!.They could be Selfindulgent socialist Wankers on Job Search, Much Much Cheaper,and we wouldn't have to listen to Tossers like manne ,bromberg or FINKelsteen.

You've hit the nail on the head there. We have a massive oversupply of people with totally useless university degrees. If the numbers of people getting a university "education" in Australia were to be halved no-one would notice. Apart from the taxpayer who would save a great deal of money.

But in those olden days (actually in Encounter magazine of July 1960) Kingsley Amis predicted the consequences of a then proposed vast expansion of British universities. His words apply so aptly to the bloated state of today’s Australian tertiary education that we would be wilfully blind not to remind ourselves of what he said half a century ago:

"The delusion that there are thousands of young people about who are capable of benefiting from university training, but have somehow failed to find their way there, is … a necessary component of the expansionist case. … More will mean worse."

Bleeding hearts like Brady never acknowledge the innate criminality of man. They subscribe to the discredited view we are all born perfect until led astray by the modern equivalent of the serpent. Peter Ryan in October's Quadrant:

"It is some fifty years since William Golding published his celebrated novel Lord of the Flies, about a party of schoolboys dumped unsupervised on a desert island. In a very short while true human nature revealed itself: they turned feral. Many of the novel’s readers with progressive views found this unpalatable and reactionary, which of course they were entitled to do. But, lurking behind their comments, one sensed amoment of horrid unease..."

Brady-thinkers are also those who point out with disgust that more people are in prison in the US than ever before...and yet the crime rate is falling.

I always enjoy your contributon to the blogs, Walter, and this is no exception. Yes, the more people sent to university, the lower the standards and what not. Soon, The Age, a roll of toilet paper, and a University Arts degree will be of similar station and function.

Our host, the good Bunyip, doesn't like certain ..................................

Only at the Age could crime be everyone else's fault except the perpetrator's. Personal responsibility, restraint, moral choices, they do not even feature in angry Farrah's world. No, we eradicate crime by providing a "better education system, more public housing, and improved services for drugs, alcohol and gaming."

It's beyond facile, and it comes to you courtesy of Melbourne's paper of record.

apparently if you're overweight or smoke you don't deserve healthcare.

"In the health system, there’s still no expectation for people to look after their own health," Nicole Brady says.

"If they drink too much, smoke too much (or) eat too much, they can still rock up at the hospital and be treated alongside – and absolutely equally – to people who have looked after themselves all their lives."

"There’s a lot of money, a lot of time (and) a lot of resources are being chewed up by people who are basically not looking after themselves."

Hmmm I do hope her BMI/weight is correct. Otherwise no medicare card for her.

"violence against women-- whose definition, by the way, has been expanded to include harsh words, disagreements about domestic finances, brooding silences"

And I'm sure that if a responsible man does happen to be lumbered with a lazy filthy spendaholic for a useless wife he'd have no right to be (verbally) upset either.

This woman defines the word moron. How's that for harsh. How about nutcase then? maybe just settle for ammoral hypocrite, that'll do.